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Reply | Original | Permalink | Share | TweetReading the recap in the NYT: "Researchers showed 180 pictures to 15 people in their 20s and to 15 older than 65, asking them to rate the pictures as emotionally negative, positive or neutral while their brains were monitored..."
They were measuring the brain activity of the rating process. Surely the older we get, the more experience we gather, the more processing power is required to rate an image and its emotional impact based on a lot of previous input, decision-making and hindsight. The brain activity of the emotional experience itself was not measured. As far as memories of the negative pictures are concerned, since older people have a lot more memories than younger ones, there must be a selection process going on as to how easily they can be retrieved. Why would I want to hold up valuable memory space with negative images that I cataloged during a psychological experiment as opposed to something negative in my own life? The experience is likely to have been more unique for a younger person and therefore more memorable to them.
As for a theory that we protect ourselves from negative emotions by rationalizing them, or attempting to be less influenced by them, as a result of wisdom.... hmmm, don't think wisdom has anything to do with it. To me, wisdom counsels digging into the emotional response to understand why it touches me the way it does, integrating the answer into my consciousness to better understand myself and the world around me.
I would be interesting to see the pictures and to see how negative and positive correlated between the groups.
Reply | Original | Permalink | Share | TweetAs I get older I have less of a tendency to volunteer for suicide missions as well. Wonder if some people are born old and most others have to get old to develop the ability to think rationally as a matter of habit (as Aristotle suggested). Some never learn - I guess they would if they just had enough varied experiences? But this is all statistical, so it is true AND not true. I know a lot of emotion-driven old people - main emotive force being fear. Can't shake that amygdala not matter how you don't try - hardwired.
Reply | Original | Permalink | Share | TweetActually the reason that Asian country students perform better at math is that the curriculum for 4th grade students in these countries include being taught in some fashion the math concept that the Identity Rule is the CORE MATH CONCEPT. This understanding is why they perform so well as a group in math. The argument that the asian languages create some intellectual advantage does not explain why other non-asian speaking countries also perform at high levels. Those countries that understand the importance of the Identity Rule refer to it as The Golden Rule of Math.
Any person with good math skills knows the Identity Rule. What appears to be less obvious to educators in the U.S. (based on U.S. student math performance) is that the IDENTITY RULE is the CORE MATH CONCEPT, and that it can be easily taught. My contention is that these concepts can be understood by a student within an hour to an hour and a half, and that once understood (the Gestalt) by the student, the student can then easily understand all subsequent math instruction, without any further tutoring. An understanding of how to use the Identity Rule to manipulate fractions gives the student the ability to perform in math in the 98th percentiles, throughout elementary and high school just like students in asian countries.
I can provide a two page tutorial that only takes an hour to an hour and a half to walk a fourth grade student through. f.barcena35@comcast.net
Reply | Original | Permalink | Share | TweetHas read with the pleasure, very interesting post, write still, good luck to you!
Reply | Original | Permalink | Share | TweetMight be interesting to study retention of information when presented with or without backchannel discussion of the material? My hunch is that people that can chat about the material that is being presented to them -- in realtime -- will remember it better.
Reply | Original | Permalink | Share | TweetI absolutely agree, Sanjay. That would be a really interesting study, and one that I really maybe ought to do! I would imagine that the people you interact with matter too: old, old friends vs. complete strangers; superiors vs. subordinates; people you converse with daily vs. people you converse with rarely (who are all nevertheless "friends").
The other question I'd like to explore is what "cognitive tasks" such interactions might facilitate. In Ybarra et al.'s study, the topic discussed in the social condition had nothing to do with the tasks they later performed. At the same time, the tasks they later performed were not very ecologically-valid. Does the effect hold when your task is writing a paper, preparing a presentation, performing data analyses, programming, etc?
Almost too many factors to do a real experimental study on...
Reply | Original | Permalink | Share | TweetIt does make me wonder whether or not the topics being discussed in the social interaction matter as well, though. It's possible that a discussion of privacy protection might be specifically intellectually engaging and stimulating enough to promote higher cognitive functioning in ways that average office small-talk like "How's the weather?" and "The coffee is cold" may not. It would be interesting to run a study where all the groups are interacting socially before doing tasks, but they vary things like: (face-to-face vs. online), (synchronous vs. asynchronous), (novel topic vs. familiar topic), (debate vs. agreement), etc.
Selfishly, I'd love to know where I can count my morning Friendfeed/Twitter fix as "work-time" if it is improving my thinking!
Reply | Original | Permalink | Share | TweetThere's a lot still to be studied about how people make use of online social spaces to for question-answering or problem solving. I'm hoping to explore some of them in my dissertation, though, so stay tuned!
Your book sounds interesting---especially the part about the value of small talk for relationships. In my current study, I'm looking at how people solve a problem using their social network, and most people have this little "social dance" at the beginning and end of their conversation. I find it really interesting because the question being asked is often pretty basic, like: "are you good at math?" And I'm seeing this between people who haven't spoken in a long time as well as with people who have spoken recently.
Reply | Original | Permalink | Share | TweetThere have been many studies, including one from UCLA, about the impact of social relationships on our brains. Having written business books on connecting and communicating, I find this study to be fascinating. But even moreso is the final question [osed about the "perception" of social interaction. I Twitter and even have an avatar and just published Face to Face: How To Reclaim the Personal Touch in a Digital World because I don't want us to lose our "in person" skills. One may have 989 "friends" online, but, like the ultimate Ghostbuster question, "who ya gonna call" when in need of help?
Reply | Original | Permalink | Share | TweetI know there are tons of studies regarding language's influence on perception, but Discovery News just posted an article about a study showing that learning words actually causes perception to shift from one brain hemisphere to the other!
Reply | Original | Permalink | Share | TweetCool. I wonder what Gary Lupyan would have to say about that.
Reply | Original | Permalink | Share | TweetPeople who smoke marijuana are good kind hearted people why don't you mention coke heads, cranksters, crack heads, and meth adicts, they're the people who feed off of the kind hearted people in society get your story straight. Pot heads preach peace love and acceptance, coke heads, crankster, and meth heads take advantage of these good kind hearted people like you and me. Legalize it! The world will be a better place! I can give you a dozzen examples about what's bad about stealing and how the people who steal and lie tend to be meth and coke heads. Give me one example of how someone who smokes pot is bad?
Reply | Original | Permalink | Share | TweetWow! You're right more than you know. I could give you a lot more examples than you gave. You are dead on. Smoking marijuana isn't a bad thing but there are much worse things that being social makes you do... You have barely opened the bottle but haven't drank any of the soda yet...
Reply | Original | Permalink | Share | TweetWelcome, Sanjay!
Reply | Original | Permalink | Share | TweetGreat article! Too Shy to Stop actually just interviewed Tim for Pandora's third anniversary. You can check out the article here.
Reply | Original | Permalink | Share | TweetWow, that's big news!
Reply | Original | Permalink | Share | TweetAs an athlete myself, I have always felt that some "emotions" and "expressions" just can't be controlled when you're in the thick of it! I don't know why I am still somewhat resistant to ceding victory to the "innate" on these types of things. There is evidence afterall (though I haven't read the full story). But the notion of embodied cognition is very popular in Cognitive Science right now---the fact that we live in bodies like *these*, essentially---this story plays right into those themes.
Reply | Original | Permalink | Share | TweetThat's a great question! I do not know the answer, but I can imagine that it would be a complicated mix of culture and personality traits. But as the researchers commented in the article, (really) not much is known about how the human mind responds to music yet! Either we need more birds or more techno dancers to answer this question ;)
Reply | Original | Permalink | Share | TweetDude, I wouldn't want to break it. (!)
Reply | Original | Permalink | Share | TweetHow about a guest review of BedPost for /Message?
Reply | Original | Permalink | Share | Tweetomg. I can't believe you reposted that. HA!
I thought the release of FitBit was definitely timely given this article.
Reply | Original | Permalink | Share | TweetFitBit does look cool. Are you going to wear one during sex? Haha!
Reply | Original | Permalink | Share | TweetCould be, but I haven't see any research on that. Women's bonding to partners seems to be related to oxytocin:
[from Preliminary research on plasma oxytocin in normal cycling women: investigating emotion and interpersonal distress by Turner, et al. ]The neurohormone oxytocin is responsible for initiating childbirth and the let-down reflex in lactating women and is released during sexual orgasm. Oxytocin has been thought of as an affiliation hormone because research on nonhuman mammals has demonstrated that it plays a key role in the initiation of maternal behavior and the formation of adult pair bonds.
I guess it is no surprise that the chemical stew in men and women is very different, and what induces (seduces?) men to bond is very different than in women. Oxytocin is also released from massage, cuddling, and other non-sexual displays of closeness and affection. These sorts of activities -- you might have noticed -- are exactly what Walum and company were measuring as indicators of men's level of bonding: that they engaged in (or didn't engage in) the sorts of behavior that leads to women producing oxytocin.
Reply | Original | Permalink | Share | TweetWhat about women? I have found women to be just as prone to wandering as men. Is this gene also a part of women's infidelity?
Reply | Original | Permalink | Share | TweetLove it! I saw this article too... In some ways it's not so surprising that a gene would influence pairbonding. Afterall, there had to be some genetic selection to keep males and females together making babies. On the other hand, this is another example of how human behavior is variable and complicated.
